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Relative Keyword Competition: The Quick and Dirty Way to See If You Can Rank

I always expected keyword research to get easier over time. But my experience has been quite the opposite. Keyword research has only gotten more complex as search engines become more sophisticated and as I learn more about what it means to do great keyword research.

The challenge with keyword research isn’t in finding appropriate keywords to target on your site, it’s in determining whether or not you can actually achieve high rankings for the keywords. Great keyword research sets the right expectations for what needs to be done to get on the first page of search results for the targeted queries. This requires great competitive analysis.

Companies like Moz have made competitive keyword analysis a bit easier with metrics such as “Keyword Difficulty”. This provides some insight into the general competitiveness of a query, but because it is an absolute metric–one that does not take into account the specific page you’re optimizing–it doesn’t tell you much about whether or not your page can compete against the pages currently on the first page of search results. To better understand this, we need to look at relative keyword competition.

I couldn’t find a tool that provided this metric, so I decided to build it myself.

Click the button below to check out the tool. But first, a few quick instructions:

Before you do anything, make a copy: File > Make a copy

For the tool to work, you’ll need to first enter your Moz member ID and secret key in the “Settings” sheet. If you don’t already have this information, you can find it here after logging into your Moz account: https://moz.com/products/api/keys

Make sure to use full URLs including the “http://”, and for home pages include a trailing slash, e.g. http://www.example.com/

13 Comments

I agree wholeheartedly that the keyword difficulty score being absolute is not that actionable. So I use a similar approach to yours except I base it on the linking root domain deficiency between the URL I want to rank and the top 3, 10 or 20 depending on where the URL currently ranks.

I was working on a post about this as well, but hesitated because I didn’t want to diss Moz’s Keyword Difficulty score.

The other part of it is that none of the link indices give you linking root domains with their free tiers, so it’d be hard to make a tool available.

Anyway this is great work and thank you for putting it out there. I hope that one of the tool makers decides to take this and add it to their suites.

Thanks, Mike! Very interested in hearing more about your approach–it sounds like with your method, you can provide more insight into what it might take to get on page 2, or page 3, etc. depending on the page’s current position for the target keyword, which is very cool. Would also be curious to learn more about your method for calculating a difficulty score.

Just to clarify, I think Moz’s Keyword Difficulty score is definitely useful in some contexts, but less so at this level of granularity. So hopefully they wouldn’t see it as a diss And I’m with you on tool makers including this in their toolset–if I had my pick, I’d like for it to be Moz because I think it works well with the rest of their data.

Dude! I need you to diss on us! C’mon man – that’s what friends are supposed to be about.

Seriously though, we’re actually going to work on integrating this concept with KW Difficulty and SERPs Analysis, so we can help illustrate the delta between who’s ranking in the top 10 and the metrics for a URL you enter. I think something like delta between you vs. avg of top 3, avg of #4-6, and avg of #7-10 would be helpful, but any additional input appreciated.

I think that’d be awesome, Rand! If I could make a request, it’d be for keyword difficulty at a keyword group level. That’d be really helpful in understanding topic-level competition–assuming your keyword set is representative of the topic, or more accurately, one aspect of that topic.

Yes, there are some sites that can rank for a keyword without trying, while others don’t stand a chance for the same keyword.
I’m trying out another tool that takes this same approach. Trend?
Thanks for making this tool available….